


I will show you fear in a handful of dust

by Krytella



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Character Death, F/M, Infidelity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-23
Updated: 2010-12-23
Packaged: 2017-10-14 00:32:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,297
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/143352
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Krytella/pseuds/Krytella
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Arthur has never regretted meeting Mal. Other things that happened, he regrets.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I will show you fear in a handful of dust

**Author's Note:**

> This story is dedicated to Lucas, who is six years gone, and my sister's friend Roxy, who died yesterday.
> 
> For a prompt at the inception kink meme: http://community.livejournal.com/inception_kink/11005.html?thread=22352381#t22352381
> 
> One million apologies to T.S. Eliot for my butchering of The Waste Land. Most of the imagery in this story comes from The Burial of the Dead. http://www.bartleby.com/201/1.html

Arthur has never regretted meeting Mal.

It's not exactly his best moment. When he decided not to sign up for another tour, he'd thought he would go to law school. Whatever beauty there had once been in dusty desert villages was gone for him. The wind came and they kept blowing away, children playing (dying) in the streets and the walls like Swiss cheese with bullet holes. Blew away as easily as the lonely walls of the training grounds he learned on, but that was before. Before dreams, before her.

He was tired of the wailing of the wind and shouting at kids who seem to get younger every month and the bullshit and the rules. But after a quarter of prerequisites his brain is melting rather than learning. He could push through this, he could, Arthur who once was Valedictorian and made it to state in track, Corporal Arthur (you didn't think it was his first name, did you?) whose voice had been gospel to the hundreds he'd led through the PECS program. But why? It's been months and he'd almost take the cardboard shacks, one hundred degrees and dead trees and dry stones, if only it means dreaming again. So he calls Cobb.

The heat of L.A. in the summer reminds him of another desert, a place like hatred and home. When he knocks on the door she opens it.

"You must be Arthur," she smiles, and he's lost. "Come in. Dom's just gone to the store. I'm Mal."

He actually has no idea who she is or why she's here. He and Cobb never got to talking about their personal lives when they worked together. You feel like you know someone somehow anyway. The first time Cobb's projection slid a kitchen knife between Arthur's ribs, he got a personal cell phone number afterwards. It's like fucking, messy and visceral and full of glimpses at the edges of something you'll never understand, leaving behind a residue of unfounded intimacy that lingers when you wake. So he knows Cobb and he only knows this must be his fiancee by the ring she wears.

Four months later is when it happens. What Arthur regretted, regrets, will regret. Dom in Hyderabad meeting with a pharma start-up with a breakthrough dream drug, Mal and Arthur in her kitchen. There are dirty dishes in the sink, a vase of hyacinths on the table.

"You don't like Scotch? How can you pretend to be a sophisticated man?" Mal harangues him. "Here, I will show you. Real Scotch." She pours them each a taste. "Never ice. Not for a good single malt."

They drink. Arthur tastes smoke and peat and a hint of pears. He wonders if he'd appreciate this more if he'd ever been to Scotland.

"Have I ever told you that you're crazy?"

"Only every time you see me."

They go through three more varieties, or is it four? He does taste the difference, the second is light and peppery, the third toffee and spice.

"So I'm crazy because my dreams are too large for you," says Mal as she pulls another bottle out of the cabinet.

"I just think you should take one step before you take another," he feels himself echo what he's said again and again, always.

"You don't have to look into their eyes. The children. How can your government tell me it's not allowed, to help them?" She's been trying to get permission to use shared dreaming in her practice ever since she first went under. "I need to understand, to see. To see what they feel." She knocks back her shot. Her pours have been getting bigger as they drink. "And you know what the worst part is?"

"What?"

"It's us that's doing it to them. These children, what's been done is wrong, but we make it worse. All of us. We tell them it's traumatic. We tell them they're dirty and damaged."

"You tell them they're loved."

"I am not the world. What am I doing? Why am I doing this?" her voice is rising. Nervous fingers twist her ring back and forth.

"You love him."

"Of course! But I was free, I believed in love, I didn't believe in... owning someone. I didn't believe loving freely was wrong. And now I'll wear a white dress and pretend, and children will see, and they will think that I am pure. I didn’t care before. I never cared." She puts her head down on the table.

"You're not making any sense."

Words keep spilling out of her. "I wanted to be in love. I wanted to be a lover. And I am, I think I am. Aren't I? I wanted to be in love and magical and different. But now we're just the same as everyone, we will grow old and love each other but what if we don't? What if I'm restless? Would it mean I didn't love him enough?"

"God, Mal. Yes, you love him. He loves you. Everyone can see it. It's okay."

He doesn't really know what to do, so he puts his arm around her. He doesn't understand, not really, but he knows restlessness and not fitting and the sneaking suspicion that normal people are vacuous and full of shit about love and fidelity.

"Is it?" She looks up and somehow their lips meet. Arthur doesn't remember quite how it happens (that's a lie, he does, but he tells himself he doesn't remember). Her face is wet with tears and he wants to kiss it away, make her okay again. Somehow he lets go enough to fall on the couch over her without thinking of how this won't make it okay, this will ruin everything. But she's there and she's lovely so he presses her down and she pulls him the rest of the way, tangling her fingers in his hair. Kissing her is like kissing love, maybe he's a little drunk but it is. It is.

So Arthur kisses her neck, her shoulders, unbuttons her blouse to kiss her collarbone and the top of her breasts and her stomach. Pushes up her skirt to kiss the softness of her thighs and pulls down her panties to kiss everywhere else. Buries his tongue inside her and draws a moan and it's all worth it, it's worth it to make her happy and to know he had the power to do that. It's not like Arthur has no pride; more like an overabundance of it. Mal urges him on, guiding with hands and subtle tilting of the hips until he's placed just right and she shudders and comes apart underneath him.

She still has her hands in his hair and it hurts when she yanks him up to kiss her, unbuttoning his pants with her other hand. Her hands are perfect and not too gentle when she grabs his cock. He's too far gone on her eyes like a drug to care, and he barely has the presence of mind to mumble "are you?" and she says, "just..." and pulls him into her.

Sinking into her is heaven. She wraps her legs around him, heels digging into the small of his back, and slides her hands around to grab his ass.

"From the day you showed up on my doorstep... you are such a pretty boy," she whispers in Arthur's ear.

"I'm not a kid." He sets out to prove it to her, moving fast but controlled.

"Of course you're not. You're Arthur. You're my knight in shining armor."

Then they run out of breath for sentences, especially sentences that make no sense. She's urging him on, breathing incoherent fragments of "like that" and "hard" and "putain" and "fuck." He wants it to last but she's so hot and wet and perfect, it's been so long. Finally she demands, "come for me, Arthur. I want to feel you inside me." And he does.

They fall asleep on the couch together. Arthur wakes first. He takes a shower, washes away the smell of sex, washes the dishes, but he knows he'll never wash away what he's done. What they did. They never mention it again to each other, and they make damn sure Cobb never finds out. Arthur toasts them at the wedding with all his heart, and he regrets so fucking much that he risked spoiling something so beautiful.

\---

Arthur builds his own life. Cobb has contacts scattered all over the nascent dream sharing underground and Arthur cultivates them. He has no legitimate legal way of using a PASIV so he discovers the other ways. Cobb's researching for a university now. Mal's probably found a way to get time under with her patients, under the radar. There are no licensed dream therapists back then. Arthur's in Edinburgh when Phillipa is born, St. Louis when James is wrested from her body in a difficult c-section. He gets letters from Mal. Updates on the children, an outpouring of theories and dreams. He's in Vegas when he gets the email explaining her totem idea. He's thinking of her when he picks out the die.

After the two of them come back from limbo, something changes. She never tells Arthur exactly what happened down there. That's between her and Cobb. Arthur asks for their help in architecture for an extraction. Dream espionage isn’t illegal in itself quite yet, but it usually involves minor crimes and he doesn’t really expect them to come with the kids and everything. Not both of them. They meet him in Vancouver and it turns out it’s Mal who pushed to go, and for once she seems interested in the world, in the challenge.

The first time they share dreams without Cobb she's all over him, still as beautiful as the day they met, and he tries to remember how broken she is but all he can see is the way she used to smile and move her hands when she spoke and make every place feel like home. He tells himself it's okay because it’s a dream. It's nothing, it's not real. She drags him into the closet of the subject’s dream house and pushes him against the wall, layers of shirts against his back and her body soft against his front, hot and insistent and constantly moving. She grabs the back of his neck forcefully when they kiss, unbuttoning his shirt and raking fingernails along his sides. Arthur shudders at her touch. This isn’t the Mal he knows but he pretends, when she pushes him to the floor and sinks down on top of him and he wants her so badly in spite of himself. He wants to see her smile again, tells himself that’s all he wants (really? Not the curve of her ass or the heat of her cunt or the ring on her finger or the life that isn’t his?), but all he gets is her moans and her hand menacing on his throat and the brief, fierce look in her eyes before she comes. Before they’re vacant again, a broken image of what used to be. And maybe that’s enough, or it isn’t, but it’s all he’s going to get. It’s more than he deserves.

Arthur only realizes later how lucky he is that she never made a pass again outside, and that she never tells Cobb. She’s already lost in a brown fog of unreality and it’s all the same to her. But to Arthur, Cobb is real, Mal is real, and he doesn’t want to break things any more than he already has.

\---

When Cobb calls to tell him that she's dead, Arthur’s mind stalls.

They're in Bangkok on the day of the funeral. Cobb is silent and cold as her grave, and what can you say at a time like this? They can only drink together silently, shitty Thai beer in a shitty Thai bar. As they drink, Arthur’s thoughts start like a car on a cold winter day. He remembers her laugh before it was brittle and too loud. He wonders if she had faltered more, if she had missed him, if she had not been so absorbed in Cobb, if maybe... maybe they would have woken from limbo sooner. Maybe she would have kept a part of the woman she used to be.

\---

He’s not surprised when he starts seeing her in dreams. His are already busy enough. Crowds flow through the streets, sometimes, eyes fixed on their feet, and he knows they’re dead. All of them. It doesn’t bother him much anymore. But Cobb brings in Mal, and she’s a special kind of dead and gone, her corpse sprouting in his mind into something different. She blooms like hyacinths and lilacs but all wrong. There’s something else, something Cobb is carrying on his back, but Arthur’s forbidden to see, so he doesn’t. He can only see his own memory, his own desire.

\---

After her ghost is gone, it gets easier. There are things he knows, things Cobb never told him. And Cobb is free to guess what happened, but he won’t. Not even now. Now, he’s occupied trying to go back to anything like normal, the pain of a dormant life trying to grow in spring rain. Arthur doesn’t have that to go back to. He has his guilt; his shadow at evening, rising up to meet him.

No. If her own kids didn’t bring her out of limbo, nothing could. And after everything that happened, none of it was because of her and Arthur. Not a thing. What happened, happened between Mal and herself and Cobb and dreams. She’s gone and the only thing he’s ever going to have is a memory. He realizes he can’t regret any of it any more. Not a single thing.

**Author's Note:**

> In my case, I was the cheater (not married, though). But the man I cheated with later killed himself and his best friend, and I don't regret any of it any more either.


End file.
